Ayşegül Savaş on Smugness and Creativity
Key takeaways
- This past January, I spent a night during a layover in Mexico City with my friend the writer Catherine Lacey.
- For some time, I’d been thinking about a scenario involving a woman who runs into a friend from her past and does not at first recognize him.
- And there was something in this scenario about creativity, too.
Illustration by The New Yorker; Source photograph by Maks Ovsjanikov Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story. This interview was featured in the Books & Fiction newsletter, which delivers the stories behind the stories, along with our latest fiction. Sign up to receive it in your inbox.This week’s story, “Many Worlds,” is about a young Turkish couple, Defne and Mete, who met as graduate students in California and are now back in Istanbul. By chance, they run into their former American housemate, Aleksi, who now looks so dishevelled that Defne mistakes him for a homeless man. When did you first start thinking about this scenario?
This past January, I spent a night during a layover in Mexico City with my friend the writer Catherine Lacey. Perhaps because of my fatigued, half-dream state, or our short time together, we started talking immediately about the most essential things. For me, such encounters outside the habitual order often give rise to dormant stories. At one point, Catherine and I landed on the topic of smugness as an obstacle to creativity. When Catherine asked me about this again a few weeks later, I specified that being smug in one’s coupledom might get in the way of artistic exploration. And, as I did so, I realized that I had come upon an angle for a story.
For some time, I’d been thinking about a scenario involving a woman who runs into a friend from her past and does not at first recognize him. But in talking to Catherine I figured out the attitude for the story. I now knew why it was that the woman would not have recognized the friend. It had to do with smugness, the way she would have grown certain of her choices. Her certainties were like a wall between herself and the world; I knew that they would have to be shaken in some way. I thought, following the conversations with Catherine, that the story would work better if these certainties involved a couple, because the situation would be less binary.